Who Killed Christian Fiction

Who Killed Christian Fiction?

It was a dark and stormy night.

The wind howled against the panes of my second-floor office, the light from the lone bulb flickering with the whistles outside. At my desk, I pounded out case files from busier days—keys slapping the paper like the rain against the windows. I had not been at it long when a flash of lightning and a knock on the door broke my concentration.

Then all went dark.

I stumbled to the cabinet and fumbled through the drawers. The candles—found them—and a light. Its orange glow guided me to the knob.

I opened the door.

Nobody. But I was sure there had been a rap upon the door—and not thunder. I lifted the candle into a hollow hallway, hearing no steps there or from the stairwell at its end. Nothing. I thought, "The electricity probably won't return for a while—might as well set up the cot for the night."

I pulled the door shut again but stopped at the sound of a shuffle on the floor. Bending, I found a slip of paper—orange from my candle and unfolded. "Someone must have slipped this under the—the knock!" Quickly I read it—four typed words: "who killed Christian Fiction?"

A stampede of questions shook the paper in my hand and the sweat from my forehead. "Why me? Why not the police? Who is this Fiction character, anyway? More importantly, who left this confounded note?"

At my desk I inspected the note with the composure only Sam Maloney, private eye, could muster in this situation. I felt the paper—stiff stock, like a menu or place mat. I flipped it over, holding it toward the candle. "Dew Drop Inn." The words were printedÑstationary, perhaps, but more likely my first instinct was right. I didn't know any establishments by that name, and I know many a swanky joint. I lifted the handset from the stand. "Operator, the Dew Drop Inn, please."

"The lines are down tonight, sir, but I can give you an address. Would that be alright?"

"Yes, yes. Let me grab a pencil."

I cut the lights of my Packard rounding the corner onto Gilbert Oke Street, a dirt road. Here the street lights and windows had not succumbed to the night's darkness, but rain had muddied the road. I parked opposite of the establishment-in-question and left my keys in the ignition. Donning my hat and rubbers, I crossed over toward the sidewalk light, spilled from the lobby windows.

No one manned the desk inside, but I found a note on the counter. "The owner is in the bar."

I looked to the left, where an undoored threshold emitted unknown tunes. I entered a room of tables void of second-hand smoke and all but a few customers. And a bar, bereft of any attendants—I walked to it anyway.

A man in a powdered wig slumped over a wooden mug on the counter. Depression squinted in his eyes, and his clenched fist evidenced a vein or two of anger. I didn't ask. A sign over the back mirror read, "Sarsaparillas: help yourself. Tap is to the left."

"That's odd," I said.

"S'got to do that so you can get your order," said another stool-sitter without looking up from his cup. "He's a foreigner—can't speak English."

"Who?"

"The bar tender—Klon Amabi." Chuckle. "Ungodly name, I think; but I guess all the people from his land have strange names."

"Where's he from?"

"Perenarnia—some place north of Scotland, I think. Anyway, they don't talk like us—or drink."

"What do they speak?" I asked.

"Something called 'allegory.' We never know what he means, so we just make up what we think he could be saying to us and nod in agreement. Besides, he's a freak of nature, and it's just best not to pay him any attention."

"Why?"

"The creature's got seven fingers on each hand, a giraffe's neck, a lizard's skin—and if that's not enough, he's purple! Can open a bottle with one hand, though."

"Wha—?"

"He's friendly enough—always smiling through those pink teeth of his. Unlike Max Brandy here—the man's always got a chip on his shoulder."

"You would, too—should, too," came the mug-buried voice of the wigged man. "If you knew that the Red Coats were coming under the guise of NAFTA, that there are French Indians in the UN—and don't you doubt that the WTO is behind Y2K and that King George uses Greenpeace to plant and hide nuclear launch sites!"

"Yes, I guess I would," I said slowly. "How do you know all of that stuff, sir?"

"Oh, I'm a barber. I hear everything. Besides, if you read II Chronicles—that's in the Old Testament—well, if you read every other verse diagonally backwards in there, it says everything I just told you—honest truth."

Just then a rumble crashed through the lobby threshold into the room. Upon a broad, black horse leaned a strapping set of cowboy shoulders. Between them and a rancher's hat hung dark sinews and darker eyes. Booming behind his black mustache and stubbled cheeks came the thunder of the open plains. "I'll tell you the honest truth. That man couldn't cut hair if his life depended on it." A chaw spit and then, "He's lucky I've got a hat—otherwise—"a quick reach to his holster brought a row of sarsaparilla bottles smashing to the floor.

"Haboob la tooleack! Ver bensk pe donum," came in high pitched yells with seven-finger claps from the towering—thing—now behind the counter.

"That must be the bartender," I mused, unable to tell if he meant those words to chide or joke through that goofy pink smile of his. I guess the informative stool-sitter must have read my mind, as the black stallion walked from his rider's back-leg slap behind me to the door.

"Oh, that happens every time Rex McGraw patronizes the place. That's cork board behind that shelf of—well, what used to be bottles. See? Klon Amabi's over there wiping down a cup for him next to the sarsaparilla tap."

I was just about to muse other things, when Brandy came out of his mug for the first time and off his stool. He walked purposefully over to the odd couple in the corner and pulled the hat off the head of the rancher. "I did this for your own good, Rex. I told you that the antichrist is going to use non-parted cuts as the mark of the beast. I had to save you from that."

"I'll tell you what you can save yourself from," gnarled the dark rustler. He pulled a pistol from his right leg and the hammer from its chamber, lifting the end of the barrel to the sweat-and-powder forehead of the man now holding his hat. "You can put that hat back and save yourself a headache," Rex rasped through clenched teeth.

"Heh, hehnt," came the squeamish, stuttered chortle from Brandy—a man frozen with his eyes crossed at the warm metal an inch from his forehead. No words came, though I don't blame him for that.

"Rex Houston McGraw, you put that gun away. That's the sarsaparilla in you talkin'." The voice—that of an Irish temper softened in the smile of a Southern belle—caught the ears and then the eyes of the bar-drawn men. And it was the cascading locks and swirls of red hair falling upon her bare, freckled shoulders that kept her audience captive.

"Rex, how could you harm someone Jesus shed his very blood to save from the heat of hell? Someone Jesus knows and loves and wants to save."

"He did—he would—do that—for me?" sneaked from the face still stiff against the cooling metal.

"Oh, yes, Maxwell. He can give you a heart without all those fears you have and a faith you could pass down to your kids someday—if you'll just ask. And he can take that anger, like the anger of this cowboy that I—that I used to love—and turn it into the indignation that will make you a secure leader of our—I mean, your home someday. He can, Maxwell, and he wants to."

And right there in the shadow of a purple neck and the music of tent meetings gone by, Max Brandy knelt and asked for a new life. And before standing back up to the ready aim of a stunned cowboy, he took advantage of his kneeling knee.

"Annabelle O'Sullivan, may I have thy hand—in marriage?"

Her quick embrace said—better than any words could—the answer she had longed to some day say. And on her way there, she came between her new fate and one old gun. Feeling it upon her hair, she turned and let go of her man and the moment.

"Rex, give me the gun. You don't need that temptation anymore. If you ever loved me, do it for love." The soft click of a returning hammer to its safe home came with the stretch of a leather coat reaching the weapon to soft hands.

Hands too soft. For in that moment when the release of will and the acceptance of remorse met between their hands, Annabelle dropped the six-shooter. To the floor it fell upon its hammer, and a shot rang for which no bottles shattered.

The stool-sitter slumped immediately to the floor, a small black hole showing through his shirt pocket. He was dead. I moved to his side to shield the others from the grimace of his face. "Does anyone know his name?" I asked.

Solemn nods told me that I'd have to check his wallet. Digging into his pocket, I wondered how he knew so well these people that never knew him—who he was, what he was.

His wallet opened to his driver's license—my mouth wide to the words I read above his address: Christian Fiction.

Lightning flashed, reflecting off the faces of grim characters thrown together by fate. Each one would blame himself—Annabelle for dropping the weapon, Rex for owning it, Max for provoking it, Amabi for allowing it. And me for being too late.

A stallion whinnied outside. And with that came the shrill realization that, though no one killed Christian Fiction, none of us were guilt free.

It was clear that nobody meant to. Besides, through it Max Brandy got saved.